


Gaslight

by AconitumNapellus



Category: Sapphire and Steel, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Halloween Challenge, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:22:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27291151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus
Summary: On a hiking holiday in the Lake District, Napoleon and Illya encounter something very strange at their hotel.This is, kind of, a Sapphire and Steel crossover, but you don't need to know anything about Sapphire and Steel to read it. The characters only come into it very obliquely.This is not explictly slash, and can be read as gen, but in this story they are a couple.
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo
Comments: 14
Kudos: 36





	Gaslight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pfrye23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pfrye23/gifts).



He sees her in his dreams. He sees her in the corner of his eye. An obscure figure, something torn from a discarded newspaper, something flickering on a television screen almost out of sight behind a lace curtain. A woman with long hair, with a long dress, with her hands held, hovering, above a translucent ball. He doesn’t know what she is, but she makes him feel afraid.

She must have come from somewhere. He doesn’t remember where.

It’s the feeling that’s the worst. The nagging feeling, the feeling of deja vu. She’s trying to tell him something. He can’t hear her words. He can’t remember when she first appeared to him. Was it the day they arrived here? Or was it in the weeks before?

‘Something haunting you?’ Napoleon asks in a jovial voice.

Illya jerks, blinks, sets his coffee down on the table.

‘Haunting?’

The bright light of day returns. He focusses on the plate on the table in front of him. Bacon, sausage, fried bread, fried egg. The yolk of the egg is broken, the bright yellow in a slick across the white ceramic. He cuts a piece from the bread with his knife, and pushes it into the yolk, sopping it up.

‘The only thing haunting me is an empty stomach,’ he says stoutly. ‘We’ve got a long way to go today.’

‘You’re saying you didn’t have that dream again?’ Napoleon asks. ‘You were muttering all night.’

‘I’m not saying anything,’ Illya shrugs, ‘except that I’m hungry.’

‘You ought to be. You didn’t get much rest last night.’

Illya almost pushes his plate away in irritation. But no. He holds it in. For a moment he just clenches his hand, and then relaxes it again. It’s the poor sleep that’s made him irritable. Nothing more than that. Poor sleep always makes him snappish. It’s nothing to do with the dream. Nothing at all.

‘Your rucksack is all packed?’ Napoleon asks him.

‘What is there to pack? It’s the same as yesterday. I only need to freshen my water.’

He had unpacked almost nothing after yesterday’s walk. He had just hung his socks and trousers to dry over the radiator, and gone to sleep in his bare skin, before pulling on the same clothes again this morning. When you’re hiking you don’t worry so much about the state of your clothes. Even Napoleon, with his love of looking suave, doesn’t seem to mind staggering back to the guest house in the evening splashed with mud, and asking to have his boots put on the aga along with Illya’s. Napoleon always looks particularly fine in a well tailored suit, but he suits the rugged look as well.

This morning, of course, he is still impeccable. Later, it will be different.

‘How are the feet?’ Napoleon asks.

‘They’re fine,’ Illya tells him, flexing his toes inside his boots. He can still feel the blisters, but he’s put plasters over them, and they’re all right.

He wishes Napoleon would just leave him alone to eat. No, not leave him alone to eat. He’s happy, usually, for Napoleon to chatter to him over breakfast. He wants Napoleon to leave him alone so he can ponder over that dream. The woman in the long dress. Her hands hovering over that ball. A – crystal ball? He doesn’t want to think of it as a crystal ball. Those things are ridiculous. But what else could it be? In a dream, almost anything. The moon, the sun, a soap bubble, a light bulb. So many things.

It is a crystal ball, he’s sure. What else could it be? A crystal ball.

‘Want to try for the top of the mountain today?’ Napoleon asks. ‘The one with the unpronounceable name?’

He looks up at the window. The hills rise like a wall on the other side of the lake. It’s a greyish day outside, the sun veiled and the light diffused. The clouds aren’t too heavy, though. Perhaps today it won’t rain.

‘We can but try,’ he shrugs.

  
  


((O))

  
  


After two hours of climbing, the peak of the mountain is a grey haze. He stands atop the summit with Napoleon, on a scree of flat, broken slates, and tries to catch a glimpse of anything through the clouds. But there’s nothing. Nothing at all. Just the tiny beads of water vapour swirling, moving in the wind. The cloud thins, then thickens again. The water clings to every part of him, like dew to a spiderweb. It clings, and then it soaks in.

‘Come to the Lake District,’ Napoleon says dryly. ‘Best views in all of England.’

‘Humph,’ Illya says, and he squats down to open his pack.

He takes out a packet wrapped in grease-proofed paper. He unfolds it, crackling, and the scent of mint rises into the mountain air. He breaks off a shard of the softish, white sugar, and holds it out to Napoleon.

‘Kendal mint cake?’ he asks.

Napoleon takes it, and he breaks his own piece and bites a little off. It’s entirely sugar, a sudden rush of energy into his bloodstream. The mint taste is almost too strong, strong enough to clear the sinuses.

‘Look,’ Napoleon points into the mist. ‘Look at the lake down there. Beautiful, isn’t it?’

Napoleon’s voice is dry with sarcasm. There’s no lake to be seen; only cloud which thins and thickens. Illya catches sight of something solid in the white haze. For a moment he thinks of a woman, her hands over a clouded ball, dressed in dark clothes. Then the haze thins a little more, and he sees it’s the trig point. Just the trig point marking the summit, and nothing else. They haven’t seen a soul all the way up here. Not a soul, and not a body to go with it.

He shivers, takes another bite of the mint cake, and stands up.

‘We could stay up here for the amazing views,’ he says, ‘but I’m in favour of getting back down before the cloud becomes so thick we can’t see our own feet.’

Napoleon gestures grandly.

‘Lay on, MacDuff.’

  
  


((O))

  
  


His legs feel dead as they struggle back to the guest house. All day the mist has clung around them, making the illusion that they’re walking in a bubble that moves with them. The world is just a great ball of grey.

He thinks of the woman, the dark dress, the grey ball under her hands. The mist swirling in the ball is the same mist that has cloaked their movements all day. For a moment he has an awful shiver in the depths of his belly. They are inside the ball. The ball is this world of mist.

Napoleon thumps a hand against his arm. It jerks him out of his thoughts.

‘A roaring fire, a hot bath, a toddy of some kind, a warm bed. Huh?’

‘A steak and kidney pie,’ Illya replies with feeling. ‘And a pile of mashed potatoes next to it. How about that?’

‘How about all of it? Can you believe England can be this cold and this wet in summer?’

Illya scoffs through his nose. ‘I can believe it all right. You should have seen Cambridge sometimes. The hills only make it worse.’

The thought of the hot meal makes it easier to pick up his tired legs. They’re on the last stretch of road back to the guest house, feet thudding on unforgiving tarmac that somehow feels far harder to walk on than the undulating mountain land of rocks and grass. His feet are flattening out with each step. The mist has penetrated everything he wears, so there’s a thin coating of water over all his skin. If the fire is lit in the guest house dining room, he’ll be like a boil in the bag delight.

‘I think this mist is purely for us,’ he says darkly. ‘Don’t you get the feeling that it’s just following us around? Everywhere we go, there’s twenty yards of visibility, and then mist. It’s like walking in a hamster wheel.’

‘That’s the nature of mist, my dear Kuryakin,’ Napoleon replies with a grin.

‘See the Lake District by Inches,’ Illya says, as if quoting a tourist brochure. ‘No views further than the end of your nose. An intimate experience.’

‘Ah, but look,’ Napoleon says, gesturing ahead.

Out of the mist, a shape is forming. A tall grey facade, Georgian windows, a sign reading, ‘The Holland Arms.’

‘Thank the Lord,’ Illya murmurs, even though he believes in no Lord, not in that way.

‘They even have the lamp lit,’ Napoleon points out.

True enough, the lamp is glowing above the door, flickering slightly, as if the current were weakening and then strengthening again.

‘I hope that doesn’t forebode a power cut,’ Illya murmurs.

‘Have courage. All that’s foreboding right now is a meal, and bed.’

The final few yards up the garden path feel like the hardest of all, but then the door is under his hand. He only has to lift his legs up the last step. He turns the door handle and opens the door with a sigh.

‘Napoleon, about that power cut,’ he says.

The hallway is lit with flickering lamps; the bright, cold light of gas.

‘Hmm,’ Napoleon says. ‘I wonder if they cook on gas too?’

Illya feels something itching at the back of his mind. Something about the lights. Were they always gas? Are these gas lights that have been sitting there on the walls, plumbed in all this time, waiting to be lit during a power cut? He doesn’t remember seeing them before, just as he doesn’t see the electric lights now. The gas light isn’t that dim. It’s not as if the electric bulbs are hiding in the gloom. There are just no electric lights. None at all.

  
  


((O))

  
  


In the big hotel lounge the fire is blazing, the light flickering warmly over the walls. But every single one of the chairs and sofas in there is empty.

‘That, at least, is a positive,’ Napoleon says, beginning to strip off his outer layers. ‘God knows where everyone is, but at least the fire is lit.’

Illya goes through into the bar. The mahogany counter is there, a few pint glasses sitting on the surface, empty but with small traces of foam on the sides. No patrons. No barman behind the bar, waiting to give service.

‘No one there,’ he says as he comes back, unzipping his coat with one hand. ‘Here. Give me yours. I’ll put it by the fire.’

He slings the coats over a chair, and stands by the crackling flames. There’s something odd in the crackling, though. He stands there for a while, just listening, just looking at the flames. There’s a certain repetitiveness. It’s as if the fire were on a loop.

‘Napoleon,’ he says.

‘Huh?’

Napoleon is standing in front of the mirror, smoothing down his damp hair with his hands.

Illya isn’t sure what to say. It’s crazy to think that the fire is burning in a loop. He stands, watching. A piece of coal pops as expanding gas seeks a sudden exit. He has already seen that bit of coal pop four times.

‘Napoleon, look at this,’ he says.

Napoleon comes to stand beside him, and Illya points.

‘Look. That piece of coal. It’s going to pop in – five, four, three, two – ’

The coal pops just as he is about to say  _ one. _

‘Hmm,’ Napoleon says. ‘Must be something to do with the rate of expansion of the gas inside.’

Illya shakes his head. There’s a little furrow between his eyebrows. He can feel it.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Watch it, Napoleon. Watch the flames. Look.’

Napoleon stands there for a long moment. Then he holds out his hand over the heat.

‘It’s a real fire,’ he says. ‘I know it is. I saw the man building it up the other day. I’ve put coal on it myself.’

‘Yes,’ Illya murmurs.

He holds his hand over the heat like Napoleon, then withdraws it and touches it to his face. His palm is cool. He holds his hand out again, feels the heat against his skin, then touches his palm against Napoleon’s hand.

‘My hand is not getting hot,’ he says. ‘I can feel it, but my skin isn’t absorbing any heat.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Napoleon murmurs. ‘You’re just cold. You got cold out on the hill. Your body’s taking time to warm up.’

‘I’m not that cold,’ Illya says flatly. ‘And neither are you.’

‘I don’t know,’ Napoleon says, and, as if to demonstrate, a little shiver passes through his shoulders. ‘I feel cold now. Don’t you feel cold?’

Illya looks suddenly over at the windows. He couldn’t say what makes him look, but he looks. The curtains are closed. They are closed, but there’s a feeling of something out there. It’s a feeling that makes him want to run over and look. A feeling that keeps his feet immobile on the carpet.

‘Napoleon, there’s something – odd,’ he says.

He doesn’t know what else to say. He’s used to concrete realities, concrete dangers. This is just – odd. The empty lounge. The empty bar. The cold gas lights. The fire which seems to be burning on a loop. Odd. It’s odd.

‘Why don’t we go up to our room?’ Napoleon suggests robustly, as if he’s trying to push away the oddness with his voice. ‘Why don’t we get dry clothes on?’

‘Good idea,’ Illya says, but he glances back at the fire. That coal pops again, a tiny flare of blue flame that bursts out and fades away in an instant.

  
  


((O))

  
  


Upstairs, Napoleon holds his room key in his hand, staring at the lock. The key is brass, compact with a jagged blade, the word ‘Yale’ printed across the circular end. But the lock is no longer a discreet slit in a brass disc. It’s a traditional keyhole, a cartoon keyhole, a circle above a black line.

‘They changed the lock while we were out?’ he murmurs, but that thought is ridiculous.

A hole must have been carved in the door for the Yale lock, wider than this narrow keyhole. To put the keyhole back, the modern hole would have to be filled in. There’s no sign of the hole being filled in, and the edges of the keyhole are smoothed and dark with age. This is no new lock.

‘Is it open?’ Illya asks. ‘Is it unlocked?’

Napoleon turns the handle left, right, rattles it. The door is locked. He crouches and puts his eye to the keyhole.

‘I think it might be in there,’ he says.

‘Hmm,’ Illya says, looking around.

There’s a gap under the door, and a small, stiff rug on this little dogleg of the passage where their room is situated. Come to think of it, wasn’t the whole floor carpeted earlier? There weren’t dark floorboards and little rugs, but a carpet, wall to wall.

Have they come into the wrong building? They can’t have. It’s not as if this were one in a row of identical buildings. This guest house is quite distinct, set apart, weighty, built of dark, heavy stone. It would be impossible to mistake it for another place.

He shakes those thoughts out of his head. He takes the little rug and slides it carefully under the door. He takes Napoleon’s key and pushes it into the keyhole, feeling for the metal bar of the key on the other side. He feels it, pushes, jiggles it about, and, after a little time, there’s the dull thud of it hitting the rug on the other side.

‘Very good,’ Napoleon says. ‘Very clever. You should be a spy, you know.’

Very carefully, Illya withdraws the rug from under the door. The key is upon it, a dark, steel thing, tarnished with age. He holds it up like a prize.

‘Are you going to do the honours?’ he asks.

Napoleon takes the key, and opens the door.

The room beyond is empty.

‘A regular Agatha Christie mystery,’ Napoleon says, looking in. ‘A door locked from the inside, but no one’s home.’

‘It’s more than that,’ Illya says.

The room was never very well appointed, but this is all different. The floor, like the hall outside, is dark floorboards laid with rugs, when before it had been wall to wall carpet. The two beds have brass frames and counterpanes. Between them is a washstand, complete with blue and white china jug and bowl. When they had woken up in this room the fireplace had been blocked up, smoothly covered, and a radiator was set under the window to heat the room. Now there is a fireplace in the chimney breast, black cast iron and tiles with a pink and green flower design. The coals are crackling merrily behind a mesh guard.

Illya glances at Napoleon, and Napoleon looks back at him.

‘I – don’t understand,’ Napoleon says.

Illya doesn’t know what to say. There isn’t anything to say. This is beyond reality, beyond common sense. It’s too far fetched to think this is an elaborate joke or prank. They can’t be in the wrong hotel. The only explanation is that whatever has happened is utterly inexplicable.

Napoleon walks over to the tall, dark wardrobe; a beautiful piece with ornate scrolling and a mirror on the door. He opens it and looks inside. He ruffles his hand through the clothes.

‘These have got to be – what? Victorian? Turn of the century? Illya, take a look.’

Illya is staring at the fire, at the repetitive cycle of the flicker and glow. Just like the fire downstairs. The sounds repeating, just like the fire downstairs.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon prompts him.

He turns to look. Napoleon is holding one of the jackets up on its hanger.

‘Good tailoring. I think it’ll fit.’

‘Don’t put it on,’ Illya says quickly.

He doesn’t know why, exactly. It’s a deep feeling. Napoleon must not put those clothes on.

‘Our clothes are soaking, dear heart,’ Napoleon reminds him, holding out his arms. ‘The fires aren’t able to warm us. Do you want us both to catch chills?’

Illya frowns at the clothes, then looks back at the fire.

‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed,’ he murmurs.

‘Hmm?’

‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It only changes form, moving from one place to another. Entropy is an incontrovertible truth. All energy in the universe is slowly dissipating to create an even spread – heat from the fire spreads out into the cool air to move towards an average temperature. But not here. Entropy isn’t working here. The energy in the fire isn’t leaving the fire. It’s – looping. Isn’t it logical to assume that our energy isn’t leaving us?’

It’s Napoleon’s turn to frown. Physics is not his strong point as it is Illya’s, but he’s an intelligent man.

‘ _ We’re _ not looping, though. We’re – well, let’s suspend disbelief and say all the things that seem to be happening  _ are _ happening. We’re not repeating like the motion of the fire. The fire is conserving its energy. We’re not.’

‘No,’ Illya says slowly. ‘That’s true.’

‘Ergo, we are going to get cold.’

‘Maybe we are,’ Illya says. ‘But don’t put those clothes on. I – just have a feeling about it.’

Napoleon glances at the clothes again, then heaves a regretful sigh, and looks back to Illya.

‘You’re the physicist in the room. You say entropy has – stopped? There’s no entropy here?’

Illya makes a low noise of consideration. It’s been a long time since his doctorate, and none of this makes sense. He hasn’t had to think about these things in a long while.

‘Impossible to really tell without being able to perform tests. But the fire does not pass its heat to us.’

He stamps a foot on the floor. The sound is muted, but it’s still a sound.

‘As if – the air around us is moving in time, but the floor, the fabric of this building, isn’t,’ he muses. ‘The sound is muffled because the floor doesn’t resound. We only hear the energy which was transmitted up through my body, into the air.’

‘Illya, does this make even a single jot of sense to you?’ Napoleon asks.

‘No,’ Illya admits. ‘No, not at all. You can’t halt time. You can’t jump from one time to another. Time isn’t – it can’t be manipulated like that.’

It’s as if he hears something, a  _ humph _ somewhere, like a memory in the back of his mind. A little sound of derision. But it must be in his imagination, because they are alone in the room.

‘Well, suppose we suspend disbelief, and approach the problem as we see it?’ Napoleon postulates. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, but we’re here, and this is what we have to deal with.’

‘We should leave here,’ Illya says, glancing at the door. ‘Nothing had changed until we walked into the hotel, had it? There were still cars on the road. The Belisha beacon was still working on the zebra crossing. We were in nineteen sixty eight until we walked in through that door. It’s  _ this _ place which is twisting things.’

Napoleon pats him on the arm.

‘Come on, then. Let’s get out of here.’

  
  


((O))

  
  


The front door of the hotel will not open.

Illya stands, rattling the handle, and it will not open. Napoleon pushes a hand above his to fiddle with the lock, but it doesn’t help. The bolts are not closed. Illya takes a few steps back, then launches himself at the door, kicking it solidly near the latch. The impact feels like concrete, jarring up into his hip, but the door doesn’t give an inch.

‘Here, let me try,’ Napoleon offers as Illya stands there, rubbing his hip.

Napoleon makes his own kick. The door doesn’t so much as shudder. All the energy of his kick resounds back into his own body.

There is a window next to the door, covered by a little curtain which runs on wires, top and bottom. Illya pushes it aside, and looks out. The road outside has been swallowed up in darkness, but the porch light is shining into clear air.

‘Fog’s gone,’ he murmurs.

Napoleon comes to look over his shoulder.

‘More than the fog has gone,’ he says meaningfully. ‘Illya, the trees had leaves when we came back this evening. Since when is it fall?’

He blinks. Napoleon is right. The bushy lilac tree by the side of the path had been in full leaf earlier. Now the branches are bare. Dead, withered leaves scud on the ground in the porch light. The ground is completely dry.

‘Watch the leaves,’ Napoleon says.

Illya watches. Two leaves blow past, then another. For a moment nothing seems to move. Then two leaves blow past, then another.

‘Just like the fire,’ Napoleon says. ‘Looping.’

Illya lets go of the curtain and whips around. He strides back into the lounge, his feet making that odd muffled sound on the floor. He pushes the curtains wide, and looks out onto drifts of snow. The snow is so deep it’s almost as high as the sill, only lit by the light that’s coming through the window. Beyond the reach of the light, all is darkness.

‘Winter here,’ he tells Napoleon.

It’s starting to feel like a new kind of normalcy. An odd normalcy. Of course it’s autumn outside the front door, and winter outside the lounge. He looks sideways out of the window, trying to see the join where winter segues into autumn between the lounge and the front door, but he can’t see that far. The light doesn’t reach that far across the snow.

  
  


((O))

  
  


A brief exploration gathers more facts. The dining room is empty, just like the bar and lounge. The door through to the kitchens swings open easily, and the passage is lit by gas down to a room which looks as though it had been preserved at the turn of the century. There are copper pans and ceramic mixing bowls and bundles of herbs hanging from hooks. The range is hot, but seems to be delivering no heat to the room.

In the interests of practicality, they gather food from the larder and bring it back to a table in the bar, but Illya regards it with suspicion. It smells like food, it looks like food. It’s fresh and wholesome. But Illya feels a bone-deep suspicion.

‘Don’t tell me not to eat, either,’ Napoleon says darkly. ‘We’ve walked twelve miles today, Illya. We need something to eat. More than the remains of your mint cake.’

Illya sighs.

‘Let’s come back to it,’ he says.

Upstairs some of the bedrooms are locked, some are open and empty. The washrooms host toilets with blue-patterned bowls and mahogany seats. The bathroom has a claw-footed enamel bath, and a rickety shower head. Staff rooms on the second floor are equally abandoned, equally out of date.

They gather a few blankets from the beds, and take them back down to the bar, to throw around their shoulders and keep them warm. Napoleon acts as barman, pouring out a few glasses of whisky from a bottle there, and setting them down on one of the little tables with the food. The empty pint glasses on the bar still have the foam on the sides. It hasn’t run or faded away.

Illya still has that uneasy feeling. They should avoid the food, avoid the drink, avoid the clothes. But hunger is strong in his gut. The sandwiches they brought for lunch on the mountain peak feel like they were eaten a long time ago. There isn’t much choice but to sink into the pork pie and slices of bread and butter, and to down the whisky. It tastes good. It tastes fresh. None of it seems like food from sixty years ago.

Napoleon looks up from his food, wiping his mouth delicately on a napkin.

‘Any salt here?’

Illya looks around.

‘There’ll be some in the dining room. Stay there. I’ll get it.’

He pushes his chair back and goes over to the connecting door. In the hotel he knows, the old, new, hotel, the door has a glass panel in it, veined with little threads of metal. Safety glass. This door is solid, made of old, dark wood.

He pushes the door open. It’s like suddenly opening a door from a cold cell onto a summer day. There are people there. People, sitting at the tables, eating and talking. The clink of cutlery on china, the knock of glasses being set back down. It is like breathing summer air.

He steps through the doorway eagerly. Something grabs him. There’s something around him, like a film clinging to every part of his body. He can’t breathe. The scent of mould, of damp. His mouth is open, but he can’t breathe in any air at all. He feels paralysed, almost paralysed, as if his movements have been slowed down to undetectable levels. It’s like a dream, where all his limbs are dead weight.

He fights, tries to make noise come from his mouth, tries to make his arms and legs move. What if he’s caught like this forever? Caught in a web like a fly, unable to move? He can’t breathe. He’s suffocating, suffocating, the stench of death in his nostrils, a weight like stone on his chest. There’s a clock he can hear, a tick so slow it is like waiting for the drip of pitch. A tick, and then an eternity of waiting.

He breaks through so hard that he’s almost running. His feet thud on the bare parquet floor. He stares around at the room. Empty tables. Empty chairs. No chattering voices. No one.

The smell of death is still with him.

He stands, and pants. He presses a hand against his chest. His heart is thudding. There’s a clock ticking, the dining room clock, a grandfather standing beside the other door. A tock, tock, tock which repeats itself over and over and over. The hands almost seem to move, but the minute hand never gets far enough to touch the next minute.

He whirls around, looking back to the door that he came through. It’s still standing open. The glimpse of the bar beyond looks normal, like the new normal; the empty place, the wooden floor, the empty pint glasses with their froth that does not dissipate.

‘Napoleon,’ he calls.

No answer. His heart beats a little harder. But his voice was cracked and died a little as he used it. He clears his throat and calls out again, ‘Napoleon!’

‘Illya?’ Napoleon calls back immediately, his chair scraping. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Don’t come through the door,’ he snaps before Napoleon reaches it, and his partner comes to a halt on the other side.

‘What do you see?’ Illya asks him. ‘What do you see in this room?’

Napoleon considers for a moment, worry in his eyes.

‘Just you,’ he says. ‘You, and the empty room.’

He feels like sagging to his knees. This is too strange.

‘I – When I looked through, I saw the future. I mean – I saw the present. Our time. Not this – this past that we’re in. Then when I tried to walk through – ’

Napoleon is looking at him with concern.

‘Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

Illya’s laugh is brittle.

‘A ghost,’ he repeats.

Wasn’t it the opposite of ghosts that he saw? He saw the living.

He scoops up salt and pepper from a table, and comes back towards the doorway. Like a man who has experienced an electric shock, he hovers on the sill.

‘Illya?’ Napoleon asks him.

He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and steps through.

Nothing happens. No spiderweb holding him. No feeling of death clinging to every part. He just steps through, and is on the other side, holding the salt and pepper for Napoleon to take. Napoleon takes it, and then lays a hand on his arm.

‘Illya, are you okay?’

He nods. His mouth feels dry. His whole skin is prickling.

‘You’re cold,’ Napoleon says. ‘Come sit down, get some food into you.’

As he sits, Napoleon throws one of the blankets around his shoulders. The feeling of warmth is immediate.

‘Thank you, Napoleon,’ he says.

He takes a mouthful of whisky. He takes a bite of the pork pie. The food tastes real. The effect of the alcohol is real. But what is real, in this place?

  
  


((O))

  
  


They sit in silence, just eating. With the blankets about their shoulders they look like refugees from a tragedy. The fire burns on its repetitive loop, but it radiates no heat. The clock ticks, and repeats, ticks, and repeats. The glasses on the bar sit there, the foam steady on their sides. Nothing changes outside of an enclosed loop of time.

Illya pours a little trickle of the salt onto the table, and stirs it with his finger. White crystals, timeless. Salt, it strikes him, is something like energy. It doesn’t get destroyed. When it’s washed away, it always comes back somewhere, forming back into those little crystals. There are things that we rely on in life that are so ancient they cannot be comprehended. The water that we drink. The salt we sprinkle on our food. The gas that comes in through pipes, unimaginably old, extracted from another time.

After a while, Illya jerks, shaking his head.

‘I feel like I’m going mad. It’s like Chinese water torture, that tick, tick, tick.’

Napoleon looks over at the clock.

‘I could stop it?’ he asks.

Illya grunts. He has a core-deep horror of interfering with the things of this time. He doesn’t know why, or where the fear comes from. He doesn’t know why the thought of stopping the clocks terrifies him so much. It does, though. There’s a wordless horror, a thought that perhaps stopping the clock will stop everything entirely. Perhaps everything will cease to move.

‘Leave it,’ he says, as Napoleon makes to stand.

Napoleon settles back in his chair again. Illya regards him, wondering why his partner isn’t showing any signs of the same terror. None of this makes sense. All of it is unbelievable. Yet Napoleon seems to be accepting it as if it were any other complicated mission. Napoleon is acting as if he were in control of time, instead of time being in control of him.

‘Aren’t you afraid?’ he asks reflexively. ‘Doesn’t this scare you?’

Napoleon looks around, and for a moment, just a moment, Illya sees something of the same fear in his partner’s eyes. Then that insight shuts down again, and is gone.

‘You’ve always faced everything head on, Illya,’ Napoleon says. ‘Is this any different?’

‘That’s an evasion,’ Illya points out. ‘We appear to be trapped in the past, in a place without people, living through the same few seconds, over and over again. Aren’t you afraid?’

Napoleon’s smile is more like a grimace. There’s none of his usual ease.

‘Illya, I am afraid to the marrow of my bones,’ he says. There’s that moment again, the moment of honest fear in his eyes. For a moment their fear connects. ‘But what can I do?’

Illya shakes his head. ‘What can we do? What training or experience have we had that would ever prepare us for this? We’ve gone down the rabbit hole.’

Napoleon takes a last mouthful of whisky, and sets his glass down.

‘I think we should approach this logically,’ he says, brushing his hands, palm down, across the table, as if clearing the space before him for action. He moves a few crumbs aside, but there’s nothing else there.

‘All right,’ Illya nods. ‘Logically. What’s your first move?’

‘Is this a hallucination?’ Napoleon asks. ‘That’s the first logical thought, isn’t it? Are we hallucinating?’

‘A joint hallucination?’ Illya counters. ‘Unlikely.’

‘Can we be sure it’s joint? How do I know you’re not part of the hallucination? How do you know I’m not?’

Illya shivers. What is worse? Thinking that what is around them is real, or that nothing is real?

‘All right,’ he says. ‘A hallucination, brought on by – what? Ergot in our bread sandwiches? Something slipped into our drinks by someone who doesn’t like us?’

Napoleon shrugs. ‘Either of those are possible.’

‘A hallucination would require inaction,’ Illya points out. ‘The best thing would be to do nothing, to sweat it out, ride it through.’

‘Supposing we are hallucinating, the best approach would be to not do anything that might harm us in the real world. No shooting ourselves in the head. No jumping out of windows.’

Illya gives a small smile. ‘I pledge to refrain from shooting myself – or you – in the head, and from defenestrating myself – or you.’

Napoleon nods. ‘Likewise.’

‘Of course, we could be drinking bleach right now,’ Illya points out, holding up his glass as if in a toast.

Napoleon shudders. ‘Let’s assume we’re not hallucinating. What else is there?’

‘Could we – ’ Illya begins tentatively, because this goes against everything he’s ever believed. ‘Could we be dead?’

Napoleon scoffs. ‘Dead? Illya, have you ever believed in an afterlife?’

‘After all we’ve seen? Even before that? No, never. But – none of this makes sense.’

‘None of it makes sense,’ Napoleon agrees. ‘But I never imagined any afterlife being like this.’

Illya breathes out a long breath, shaking his head.

‘Well, what else do we have. Ideas?’

‘Let’s suppose that this is real. We’re – somehow back in time. You’re the quantum physicist, Illya. Tell me how that could happen.’

Illya shakes his head. ‘Time travel is not something I ever covered. I didn’t investigate ghosts, premonitions, or tarot cards, either.’

‘You’re the one who suggested an afterlife. Don’t be a snob. You’re a scientist. You not supposed to reject anything out of hand.’

‘ _ Some _ things, I can reject.’

‘Time is the fourth dimension, right? We can move from left to right, up and down, from back to front. Why not back and forth through time?’

Illya feels exasperated. ‘Because time isn’t  _ like _ that. We live a moment, and it’s gone. We have no concept of how to navigate time as we navigate space.’

There’s something at his back. A pressure. A feeling of someone waiting to speak.

‘Just because we don’t know how to do a thing, doesn’t mean that thing is impossible,’ Napoleon argues.

Illya sighs. He closes his eyes for a moment, shaking his head.

‘When I went to that door,’ he says, jerking his head towards the dining room, ‘I saw our present. Just for a moment, everything was normal through there.’

‘So – the present exists, the past exists, the future exists, all in the same place, all overlaying one another.’

‘A palimpsest,’ Illya murmurs. ‘Yes, they all exist. And somehow we’ve been – derailed from our correct time. Somehow – we are here.’

He feels deadly tired. Now the food is in him, the whisky is in him, the blanket is making some warmth, he feels incredibly tired. His limbs ache, his bones are tired.

‘What time is it?’ he murmurs.

The tiredness feels unnatural, like too much, like something creeping over him and forcing him towards sleep.

Napoleon glances at the clock, the hands of which are stuck between eight fifteen and eight eighteen. Then he looks at his watch. Illya does the same. His watch reads quarter past ten.

‘What do you have?’ he asks.

‘A quarter after ten,’ Napoleon confirms.

He sits, eyes on the second hand of his watch as it hurries round the face. Illya watches too. The second hand scurries, the minute hand drags behind. It moves on one minute, two minutes, three. It clicks onto the fourth minute, and then the fifth.

‘Our watches are working as normal, then,’ Napoleon says.

‘As normal,’ he repeats.

He’s so drowsy. So very drowsy.

‘Hey, maybe you should go upstairs,’ Napoleon says, nodding towards the door. ‘You look beat.’

‘I’m – I’m not – ’

He doesn’t want to go upstairs. Their room isn’t there. He doesn’t want to sleep. He’s afraid of sleeping, afraid that sleeping will cement him somehow more deeply into this place. But there’s nothing he can do. His eyelids are dropping. His body feels like lead.

‘Not upstairs,’ he murmurs.

‘Come through to the lounge, then,’ Napoleon says. ‘Let’s hole up there for the night. We both need sleep.’

‘Sleep,’ he echoes.

His eyes are hot. Napoleon’s hand is on his arm, making him stand, making him walk. He doesn’t want to sleep. He doesn’t want to go through the door, to get caught in that web again. But there is no web, not passing from the bar back into the lounge. They just step through the door, and there’s the lounge, this old-fashioned lounge, with its armchairs and sofas, and the fire crackling on its never-ending loop.

‘There ya go,’ Napoleon says, lowering him down onto one of the sofas.

Illya struggles to focus. Does Napoleon look concerned? Is he just tired too?

‘Feet up, buddy,’ Napoleon says, hoisting up Illya’s feet.

_ Don’t take off my boots,  _ he wants to say, even though his boots are wet, his feet cold in them. But Napoleon doesn’t try to take them off.

‘Stay awake,’ he tells Napoleon. ‘Wake me up. Take watches.’

‘All right,’ Napoleon says, patting his arm.

Illya doesn’t know if he’s being humoured. His eyes are shutting. His body is sinking into the cushions of the sofa. Napoleon is arranging the blanket over him, because the sofa is near the fire but there’s no heat reaching him. Although his clothes are damp and chilled, he still finds himself plummeting down into sleep.

  
  


((O))

  
  


There she is. The woman. Her dress is grey, or – Is it grey, or a dark slate blue? Her eyes are blue. She is holding her hands over a ball. She is smiling. Is she grey? She seems like a photograph gaining colour, slowly transitioning from monochrome to life.

_ That’s it _ , she says, but he doesn’t think her lips are moving.  _ That’s it. _

What is it, he wonders. What is it?

_ I need you to do this _ , she says, but he doesn’t know what.

What must he do? Her eyes are so blue. He must do this thing for her. Her hands are over that ball, holding it, and he tries to see it, to know what it is. Not a crystal ball. He’s sure it isn’t a crystal ball. It’s too bright now, too white.

_ I need you to stop it _ , she says.

She seems far away. She’s right there, in his dream, close to him, but she seems so far away. She has a Mona Lisa smile. She has trust in her eyes. Her hair is falling down around her face, framing her face, and her lips have such a trusting smile. He wants to tell her that he doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t know how to speak.

He hears someone else, a man’s voice. Impatient. Low. He can’t make out the words, can’t look to see who else is there. It’s a cold feeling, a feeling of something stern and cool, somewhere nearby, behind him, just off-stage. The woman looks past him towards that other voice, and something changes in her face. It’s no longer a trusting look, but a look of pure love.

_ I need you to stop it _ , the woman says again, and she’s looking directly at him now, her lips not moving, her voice in his head. Her hands are on a globe, on something that glows from within, a white mist of light.

  
  


((O))

  
  


He wakes with a gasp, sucking in air. For a moment he is trying to suck in air, but nothing is happening. Then he heaves, air rushes in, he feels it like a douche of cold water through his body. He is lying on the sofa, under blankets, his clothes still damp against his skin, his clothes chilled.

He stares up at the ceiling. Off-white, as if it has been stained by years of nicotine. There’s a plaster mould up there, above the light in the centre of the room, where the gas pipe comes down to meet the shade. He lies staring at the cold flicker of the light. It’s like looking at a full moon, like a tulip filled with light, like –

He breathes and breathes. He feels confused, adrift. He moves his arms, stiffly. All his joints feel stiff. He has walked a long way, and now he’s stopped his muscles are sore. There’s a little kink in his back, his thighs ache.

_ Napoleon _ , he thinks.

He looks around, looking for Napoleon. He’s there in a wing-back chair near the fire, under blankets, fast asleep.

Illya sits up suddenly, his mind coming back to full speed. Napoleon wasn’t going to fall asleep. He was going to stand guard. He looks at his watch. It says ten forty three. Half an hour has passed.

But there’s something wrong. He sits there, looking at his watch, seeing the second hand ticking around. It hurries around the face, and the minute hand ticks on. It hurries around again, and again – and then the minute hand is back at ten forty-three. He doesn’t see it happen. It is on ten forty-six, and then it is on three, and he cannot see where it makes the jump backwards.

Cold runs through him. It’s an awful chill. He wants to rip his watch from his wrist, throw it onto the floor, and stamp it into shards of glass and metal. He stops himself from doing that. He breathes in slowly, just a few deep breaths. Then he pushes himself to his feet and goes over to Napoleon. He shakes his partner roughly by the shoulder.

‘Hey,’ he says.

Napoleon blinks, coming awake, his eyes red and unfocussed.

‘What? I – ’

Illya grabs at his arm, pushing up his sleeve to look at Napoleon’s watch. The hands say ten forty-four.

‘Look at this,’ Illya hisses. ‘ _ Look at this! _ ’

He holds Napoleon’s own wrist in front of his face. Napoleon blinks at the watch.

‘You fell asleep, Napoleon. Our watches have stopped marking time. They’re repeating a three minute loop.’

Napoleon is starting to come back to awareness.

‘Hell,’ he says. ‘Oh, hell. I fell asleep, didn’t I? I’m sorry, Illya. I was cold, so I wrapped up in that chair. And – I guess I was tired too.’

Illya remembers the exhaustion that had come over him. It had been inexorable. He had not been able to fight it.

‘Maybe it wasn’t your choice,’ he says. ‘Maybe – ’

It’s all too strange. He doesn’t understand any of it. He’s familiar enough with exhaustion, with drugs, with any number of things that can send one to sleep. But this? None of this makes sense. None of this fits into his carefully nurtured, carefully rational world view. He doesn’t believe in ghosts. He doesn’t believe in the supernatural. None of what is happening can be real, but he is here, and he cannot escape.

‘Did you dream anything?’ he asks urgently.

‘Huh?’ Napoleon asks.

‘Dream. Did you dream anything?’

Napoleon blinks at him. ‘No, nothing. I don’t think – No, I don’t remember anything.’

Illya huffs out breath. Just his dreams, then. The woman comes only to him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Napoleon says again.

He looks so rueful that Illya reaches out to pat him on the arm.

‘It’s all right, Napoleon. It wasn’t your fault.’

He jerks a look at his watch again, seeing the second hand ticking around, seeing the minute hand stuck between forty-three and forty-six. His skin creeps with a shiver that runs the length of his body.

The clock. He looks over at the clock. The time had been about eight fifteen, he remembers. It was stuck at that time. But the hands have moved on. Now they stand at nine thirty six.

‘It’s moved,’ he says, looking back at Napoleon. ‘Time has moved while we were asleep. The clocks have changed.’

‘Time?’ Napoleon asks stupidly. ‘The time is – ’

‘It was a quarter past eight. It’s nine thirty six. It’s later in the evening. Our watches have stopped, and the clocks here have moved on.’

‘Still looping?’ Napoleon asks.

‘I think so.’

He looks at the fire. The flames are still making their repetitive movements, but it’s different, he thinks. The pattern has changed, as if he is looking at the fire of later in the evening, rather than earlier.

He stalks over to the window and looks out. The snow is still there, thick and billowed and innocent. The gas light shines out over it, making facets of ice sparkle, before being swallowed by the darkness further away.

He walks out into the hall, looks through the window at the side of the front door. The light is shining on a few leaves that are lying on the ground, but the leaves are covered in frost. There’s no clock in the hall, nothing with which to check the local time.

That feeling of dread rises again. Winter outside the lounge. Autumn creeping now to winter outside the front door. His watch, Napoleon’s watch, stuck in their own little loop of time. The clock in this lounge room moving forward. Things condensing down, freezing, narrowing to a sliver of a few minutes in a deep winter decades ago.

He strides back into the lounge.

‘We need to find out when this is,’ he says decisively.

Napoleon looks at him, blinking, as if he’s still half asleep.

‘We need to find out the date,’ Illya says more clearly, raising his voice. ‘Napoleon. We need to find out what the date is, what the year is. There must be significance to this.’

‘Date,’ Napoleon says. He rubs a hand over his face. ‘Date. Yes. There must be a calender somewhere.’

‘The register,’ Illya says. ‘There should be a register at the front desk.’

He wants to ask half-pleadingly,  _ Come with me _ ? He feels self conscious. He has done many things alone, many terrifying things. But he has never been in a place like this before. He has never felt lost in time.

‘Okay,’ Napoleon says, getting to his feet, tightening the blanket around his shoulders. ‘Come on.’

It’s as if he’s read Illya’s mind. It’s a warm relief. Together they walk through into the front hall again. There’s a book on the reception counter, broad and flat, dark leather covers. Illya opens it, and scrolls through. The paper makes a dry hiss as he turns the pages. It sounds unnaturally loud. Every movement, every noise, feels like it will disturb time, bend it or break it and send everything tumbling into chaos. Time has always felt like a solid dependable, not a soap bubble waiting to burst.

‘What’s the date?’ Napoleon asks, peering over Illya’s shoulder.

‘I think – ’

He squints. He doesn’t have his reading glasses, and the hand is tight, slanting copperplate. English handwriting had taken a long time to get used to, after growing up with Cyrillic.

‘Is that a one?’ he asks.

Napoleon nudges him aside.

‘Let me look. Nineteen oh – seven? Is that a seven?’

Napoleon scrolls through the last few filled pages, to the most recent entry.

‘Two, twelve, nineteen oh seven. Twelfth February, nineteen oh seven,’ he murmurs, running his finger along under the date.

‘Second of December,’ Illya corrects him. ‘Remember where we are.’

‘Okay, yeah. Second December. Does that mean anything to you, Illya? What is it – six years after Victoria dies? Did anything significant happen?’

Illya shrugs. ‘British Edwardian history is not my speciality. I have no idea.’

‘Does it need to be a date we’ve heard of?’ Napoleon muses beside him. ‘Why should it be a great date? The sinking of the  _ Titanic _ , the attack on Pearl Harbor. Usually the most significant moments in a person’s life are only significant to them, to a small handful of people at most.’

‘A microcosm,’ Illya muses. ‘We all live in our own microcosms. Let’s look at these entries, then. Let’s see who’s in the rooms.’

He scans through the names, trying to decipher them. Couples. Single men. Single women – maybe spinsters. He thinks of the old spinster who is in the room next to theirs in the hotel, in the modern-day hotel. He had heard her talk of how many years she had been coming to this place. What was her name? Or – what will her name be?

‘Rawlins,’ he says. ‘Ellen Rawlins, isn’t it?’

Napoleon nudges a finger at one of the entries.

‘Yeah. Well, E. Rawlins, anyway. And there’s a Mr and Mrs W. Rawlins on the line above. Where’d’you get the Ellen from?’

Illya blinks, staring at that entry. Is that what it says? Miss E. Rawlins. It’s so slanted, so scrawled, and his long-sightedness makes the letters blur softly.

‘No,’ he says. ‘No, I meant the old woman in the room next to ours. Miss Ellen Rawlins. Isn’t that what she said her name was?’

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says, looking at him.

Illya has an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach. It’s like falling, like when a plane hits a pocket of air and suddenly plunges.

‘What’s the room number?’ he asks.

‘Seven,’ Napoleon says. ‘That’s next door to ours, isn’t it? Room seven? We’re in room eight, the same room as Mr and Mrs Rawlins.’

‘She’s in room seven now. I mean, she was – will be – in room seven in our time. She said she’s been coming here for years. Don’t you remember, Napoleon? That evening, when she was talking to someone in the lounge so loudly? She’s been coming here since she was a girl? And this time she was put in the same room that she’d had as a girl. The first time since then.’

‘She said that,’ Napoleon muses. ‘Yes, she did say that. So I suppose it’s not such a surprise to see her name here. She would have been – what? It’s sixty years ago. She must have been a young girl then, almost twenty, maybe.’

‘Maybe it’s not a surprise, but there are three hundred and sixty five days in a year, and she happens to be the only living thing we know of that connects these two days, past and present,’ Illya points out. ‘Come upstairs. Let’s go and look at her room.’

  
  


((O))

  
  


Her room is just like theirs, with the exception that it is a little smaller, and only has a single bed. The wooden floor, the rugs, the washstand with basin and jug, are all the same. In the wardrobe are a few dresses, suited to a girl becoming an adult of that time. Outside the window the world is lost in darkness, with just a faint glint of light on snow near the downstairs windows.

‘Bed’s not slept in,’ Illya murmurs, running his hand over the covers. ‘Wouldn’t a nice girl like her be in bed by this time of night?’

‘What time of night?’ Napoleon shrugs. ‘The time by our watches, or by the clocks downstairs? By those clocks, she could still be having dinner.’

‘Could be. We’ve moved from eight to half past nine. It’s building to something,’ Illya says with a certainty that he can’t explain. He’s moving around the room, exploring whatever he finds, opening and shutting drawers, running his fingers over surfaces. ‘Coming to a climax. It’s all coming to a point on a winter night.’

Napoleon stares at him.

‘What point, though? Why? What does any of this – ’

He trails off as though it were hopeless. It is hopeless. There’s no one here, no one to question. They can’t skip forward through time and ask the Ellen Rawlins of the future what happened on this night.

‘There’s nothing more to see here,’ Illya says.

He’s standing in front of the dressing table, closing one of the drawers again. There’s hardly anything in them. A few items of clothing, a few knick-knacks. Nothing more. His image is reflected back at him in the mirror, but he doesn’t want to look at it. Something makes him not want to see his own eyes, his own face.

There’s a movement, though. Something in the mirror, something flickers. His eyes shoot up. It’s not Napoleon. Napoleon is standing in the wrong place entirely. It’s a movement over by the door.

He turns on his heel, staring at the door. For a moment it’s as if he sees something. A woman, passing through the door. More of a feeling, almost, than something he really sees. A woman walks through the door. She walks through the door again, and again. She is caught in a loop, leaving the room.

‘Do you see that?’ he asks Napoleon. He feels as though his bones have turned to ice.

Napoleon is caught too, staring.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, I see it.’

‘A woman.’

‘A young woman. Brown hair. She’s wearing a hat.’

Illya tries to see. He can’t make out that much. There’s just that feeling, the woman passing out of the room.

‘Is it our Miss Rawlins?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Napoleon says, shaking his head. ‘I can’t tell. A woman changes a lot in sixty years.’

They must leave the room. Illya doesn’t want to walk through that flickering figure, but they can’t stay trapped in this room.

‘Come on,’ he says.

As he passes through the door, there’s that moment again. Just a fleeting moment this time. An inability to breathe. A scent of damp. A feeling of being stifled. Then he is on the other side.

‘Did you feel that?’ he asks.

‘Feel what?’ Napoleon replies.

  
  


((O))

  
  


They sit in the lounge, watching the ticking of the clock. The hands move slowly, then they’re back where they began. Time is caught, stuttering, never moving on.

‘But our watches moved on,’ Illya muses. ‘They were moving on, until we slept. And time – ’

‘Winter here, fall outside the front door,’ Napoleon murmurs. ‘But the date in the register is winter.’

‘Maybe,’ Illya shrugs. ‘Or it could be only a day’s difference. One day the ground was dry, dead leaves blowing. Overnight, snow fell. It could be more condensed than we realised.’

‘This Miss Rawlins. Did you talk to her much?’ Napoleon asks.

Illya grins suddenly. ‘I barely spoke a word to her. But I listened a lot. I overheard.’

Napoleon returns his grin. ‘You’re a nasty little spy,’ he says affectionately, ruffling Illya’s hair with one hand. ‘Did you know that? We’re meant to be on vacation, you know.’

It’s such a comforting feeling, being touched. Such a human thing. He wishes Napoleon would do that again, to make him feel connected to life, to his own, living present. The past feels cold, unwelcoming. He shivers a little, and Napoleon looks at him.

‘Yeah, my clothes aren’t dry yet either. I just wish the fires would do something to warm us up.’

‘They can’t,’ Illya says reasonably. ‘They can’t lose heat without the motion of time. Entropy isn’t working here. At least, not for the fires.’

‘But it is for us,’ Napoleon muses. ‘We have entropy, yes? We’re ageing, digesting food, getting hungry, getting cold.’

‘We seem to be. We’re the exception. The fly in the ointment. The irrefutable proof that time still exists.’

Napoleon grimaces. ‘Well, I guess that’s a kind of a comfort. To know that we’ll carry right on ageing until we die.’

Illya snorts. ‘We’ve both got a good few years yet, Napoleon. I don’t think we need to be worrying about ageing at the moment. You’ll keep your good looks for now.’

Napoleon straightens up a little, running a finger across his hair, smoothing down a few strands. Then he asks, ‘Miss Rawlins. What did you overhear, in your nasty, spying way, Illya?’

‘She rambled,’ Illya says dryly. ‘She’s in her eighties. I know that much. Not the exact age.’

‘So she could have been around twenty now, in this time?’

‘Around twenty, yes. A significant age for a young girl in that time, I think.’

‘In any time. She’s become a woman.’

‘But probably still under the thumb of her parents. She mentioned that, I think. I heard her say something about sneaking out. When she visited this place as a young woman, she used to sneak downstairs after they’d all gone up to their rooms – to meet her young man.’

‘Ah,’ Napoleon says with a grin. ‘There’s always a young man, isn’t there?’

‘Yes, and it’s usually you,’ Illya says dryly.

Napoleon shoots him a look of mock hurt, moving his hand up to fiddle with the knot of his tie, but he isn’t wearing a tie. Instead, he just touches his collar.

‘Well,’ he says, like a cat recovering itself after a fall. ‘So Miss Rawlins had a young man. In this hotel, hmm?’

‘Possibly. She didn’t say that much.’

‘But she never married. She’s been a spinster all her life.’

‘Then the possibility is that something happened – something that affected her entire future.’

‘Possibly, in a lurid novel,’ Napoleon says doubtfully. ‘Do things like that really happen, Illya? Women really are ‘ruined for life’ by these kind of things?’

‘Then? Nineteen oh seven, still the Victorian age to all extents and purposes. You’d better believe it, Napoleon,’ Illya says darkly.

‘She was leaving her room,’ Napoleon points out. ‘When we were upstairs, we saw her leaving her room.’

‘Hmm,’ Illya muses. ‘I wonder where she was going?’

He closes his eyes, leaning his head back against the chair. A young woman, in the years before the Great War, sneaking out of her hotel room to meet her young man. An event that may have derailed the rest of her life. He pictures the old Miss Rawlins’ face as she talked. There was an element of pride, of defiance, in what she said, but there was something else, too. Something in her eyes. It was something in her eyes that cut through everything else. Like looking through to another world.

The woman. The woman with the grey-blue dress, her hands over that ball of light. He was thinking of Miss Rawlins, but that woman is there now, swimming in his mind. She’s trying to tell him something, but he doesn’t know what it is.

_ Time _ , she is saying.  _ It’s all about time. _

But I  _ know _ that, he wants to retort. He knows that time is the most important factor here.

_ It can’t be changed _ , she says. He can hear her voice. It’s smooth and soft, very well-spoken tones. She’s insisting. Time cannot be changed. There’s a hint of desperation in what she’s saying. She is desperate to make him understand.

If time can’t be changed, he thinks, then what are we doing here?

_ It  _ must _ not be changed, _ she insists.  _ Not can’t. Mustn’t. Can you hear me? Do you understand? _

But he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know what it is that he must understand. Time is like an arrow, always moving forward. You can’t hop onto that arrow in mid-flight and turn it around. Can anyone do that?

_ They can. They can _ . She is quiet, dull, almost. There’s a resignation in her voice.  _ They prey on the weak. Entice the weak. Please. I have to make you understand. _

He can see the ball she holds. Translucent, not transparent, like frosted glass. It glows. The light is coming from within. Like a gaslight. It’s like a gaslight, in its frosted glass shade.

He feels something like triumph. It’s not his triumph, but hers.

A gaslight? He wonders. This is a gas light in her hands. Not a crystal ball. Nothing so fanciful. She is showing him a gaslight in a frosted glass shade.

But what – ? he thinks. Why would she show him such a thing?

The hiss of gas. The smell of it. An ancient thing. The gas supplying this hotel must have been laid down millions and millions of years ago. It has lain under bedrock, until men cracked through and sucked it out. It was another time, dredged up into this one, so at odds with the time it has found itself in.

_ Yes _ , she is saying.  _ Yes. Please, understand. Do you understand? _

Gaslight? He thinks.  _ Gaslight? _

The moment of incredulity is so great that it jerks him awake. He blinks, staring around. Awake? He hadn’t realised he’d been asleep. He is frustrated with himself, frustrated that he fell asleep again, frustrated that he woke too soon. It was some kind of epiphany. At last, he was starting to understand.

‘Illya?’ Napoleon asks. ‘You dropped off again.’

He stares, trying to gain a moment of calm, to let all those thoughts coalesce into something meaningful. He just sits there, not speaking, trying to gather all the thoughts in.

‘Napoleon, this is going to sound crazy,’ he says after a while.

‘More crazy than all of this?’ Napoleon asks, looking around himself.

‘Someone is trying to contact me,’ Illya says.

He feels embarrassed even talking about it. It’s like talking about seeing a ghost.

‘Contact you?’

‘The dream I’ve been having.’ He can’t look at Napoleon’s face. ‘I’ve been having a dream about a woman.’

‘Miss Rawlins?’

He shakes his head. ‘No. Not Miss Rawlins. Someone else. She’s been trying to tell me something, ever since we came to this place. Trying to get me to understand.’

He closes his eyes. Trying to remember a dream is a nebulous endeavour. In the dream, everything makes sense. Awake, nothing does. It all tries to drift away.

‘I have been seeing a woman in this dream – persistent dreams. Not Miss Rawlins. She’s holding something. I thought it was a crystal ball, but it’s not. It’s a gaslight. She’s trying to show me a gaslight.’

Napoleon’s gaze flicks up to the gaslights around the walls. They’re in more fancy shades here, bulbous and fluted, so they look like lilies of the valley. They’re not crystal balls in this room.

‘A plain gaslight,’ Illya insists. ‘It’s in a round shade – a globe-like shade. The light is very strong and bright.’

‘The kitchens,’ Napoleon says, looking over towards the door. ‘I think they had ones like that in there. In the back rooms, the working areas.

Illya looks over that way too. For a moment, he sees something. A young woman again, slipping through the door.

‘She’s going that way,’ he says. ‘Our young woman. She’s heading for the back rooms.’

‘A nice young woman like her?’ Napoleon asks rather slyly.

‘This is important, Napoleon,’ Illya reminds him, and Napoleon says gently, ‘I know.’

  
  


((O))

  
  


In the back rooms all of the lights are plain. There are none of the fluted, beautiful shades, designed to look like flowers. Illya stands in the passage that runs past the kitchen, looking up at the lights on the wall. These ones aren’t like the image in his dream at all. They’re mean little things, only throwing out enough light to see by, and nothing more. The pipes that supply them have none of the polished sheen of the pipes in the guest areas.

_ Please _ , he hears her say.  _ Please. _

‘Do you see anything?’ he asks Napoleon. ‘You seem to be able to see her more clearly than I do. Can you see her anywhere? A doorway? Passing through?’

Napoleon looks up and down the passage.

‘Nothing,’ he says.

They look into the kitchen on the way past. The gaslights are flaring, but they’re not right. They’re still not like the image in Illya’s mind.

‘Come on,’ he says, tugging at Napoleon’s elbow.

They move on down the passage. There are doors to the left and the right. None of them have the image of a woman passing through.

‘I can’t – ’ Illya begins in frustration. ‘I don’t know where she’d be going down here. There must have been people down here. What could she have got up to without being seen?’

Napoleon opens another door, a narrow little door a step up from the ground.

‘Look,’ he says.

Stairs lead up, straight behind the door. They’re narrow, the handrail on the wall dirty, the paint dirty from the touch of hands. The light is dim.

‘Servant’s stairs,’ Illya realises. ‘They couldn’t have the servants using the main stairs. Do you think – ?’

‘Come on,’ Napoleon tells him.

‘Do you see her?’

‘No. I just have a sense we’re on the right track.’

The stairs are so narrow that, even going single file, Illya’s shoulders feel cramped. They reach a door after the first flight, and he cracks it open.

‘It just leads back to the guest rooms,’ he says, looking into the corridor beyond. ‘It must be disguised as a wall panel. I haven’t noticed it before.’

‘Okay,’ Napoleon nods. ‘Well, the servants’ quarters are on the next floor, right?’

Illya nods, and carries on upwards. The door at the top of this flight hasn’t been disguised as anything. It’s made of boards, nailed together with a Z of bracing on the back. It opens onto a passageway lit with just a few small lights.

Illya steps over the threshold. He is growing to hate and fear thresholds, afraid of that awful sense of being trapped. It pushes at him, but he steps through.

‘I think she came through here,’ he says.

‘Up to the servants’ bedrooms. No wonder she got into trouble.’

There’s a feeling of urgency, a feeling of desperation. There’s something moving in the corners of his vision, a sense of bodies, people passing through. There are more actors in the drama now. The stage is becoming full.

There’s a door up ahead. He can see the shadow there, the form of the young woman, her hand lifting to the latch. He steps forward.

_ No! _

He can’t tell where it comes from exactly. It’s a mingling, the soft woman’s voice, and something harder, as if two people are shouting at him at once. A man and a woman, both shouting in their urgency.

_ No _ , he hears again, somewhere inside him.  _ No, not there. Not now. _

‘Illya?’ Napoleon asks him.

It’s as if Napoleon is in a different place, as if he and Illya are both experiencing different layers of the same thing. Napoleon is in the corridor with him, but not everything of the corridor is there for Napoleon as it is for him.

_ They want you to stop her _ , the woman is telling him.  _ They need you to stop her. They want you to be the instrument that changes time. _

‘Wait,’ Illya says to Napoleon, gripping his arm.

The fabric of Napoleon’s sleeve is still damp under his fingers. Damp, and cool. He feels very real, more real than any of this. He wants to carry on clinging to him, just to be in contact with something he knows, something reliable, and of his own time.

‘Stay still,’ he says, keeping his fingers clenched around Napoleon’s arm. ‘We’re – ’

‘Illya, she’s going into that room,’ Napoleon says insistently, shaking his arm in Illya’s grip. ‘We need to stop her. This is the moment. This is when she gets caught!’

‘ _ No! _ ’ Illya tells him, the word  _ no! _ Ringing in his head, as if two people were shouting it at him at once. ‘No, we can’t. That’s the whole point. It’s – ’

He doesn’t know how to explain. He doesn’t understand it himself. It’s about not changing time, about not letting  _ Them _ change time. Whoever  _ They _ are, they want to twist and distort and buckle time, and he must not let it happen. Those two voices are screaming somewhere in his head. He must not let  _ Them _ change time.

_ The other room, _ the woman’s voice is telling him.  _ The other room. Please. We don’t have much time. Please! _

‘Napoleon!’ Illya growls, jerking at his arm, because Napoleon is still trying to move towards that room. ‘Napoleon, we can’t!’

There’s something in Napoleon’s face, something odd. It’s like looking at a stranger. Like looking at a person you know and love, whose soul has subtly changed. He knows, in that moment, that it is  _ Them _ .  _ They _ have Napoleon in their grip.

There is the terrible feeling, the feeling of a trapdoor opening under his feet. Fear, falling. The fear of losing Napoleon, his only constant in this strange world. He keeps hold of Napoleon’s arm as Napoleon struggles against him. There’s a feeling like a wind. It’s like being caught in a wind, caught in screaming, fighting against something he can’t see or feel and hear, but like being caught in a hurricane. He holds Napoleon’s arm, wrestling with him, pulling him back, back, across the corridor, back towards that other door. Napoleon is jerking and pulling and trying to break free, but Illya locks his muscles and pulls. He doesn’t want to knock Napoleon out. He doesn’t know what would happen to their thread-like connection to their own time, if Napoleon fell unconscious. If Napoleon’s mind were unconscious, in a stillness deeper than sleep, would Napoleon be caught in his own three minute loop? Would Napoleon be lost to him, caught by another time?

They are through the door. Illya presses it closed behind him with his body, still holding Napoleon with clenched hands. The feeling of the storm doesn’t let up. None of it lets up. It’s awful, screaming, tearing. It is death coming for him, whipping around him. A terrible thing.

They are in a bedroom. A mean little place, a narrow bed, brown blankets and white sheet. A little window looking out on darkness, under the sloping roof. On the wall, a single gas lamp. A globe. A white, translucent globe, flaring with white light.

‘ _ Napoleon _ ,’ Illya grates, trying to get through to him.

The screaming is in his head, tearing at him. Everything in the room should be blown into chaos, but the wind is inside his own head. Everything in the room is still. There’s just the gaslight, flaring.

‘ _ Napoleon! _ ’ Illya shouts, trying to get through to him.

He lets go with one hand, and slaps him across the face.

For a moment everything is still. Napoleon stares at him. There is utter silence, silence inside his head, silence outside. In that moment, Illya lets go of Napoleon and smashes the perfect globe of the gaslight shade.

It is like a release of breath. A sudden release of tension. His knees feel about to buckle beneath him. Napoleon is no longer fighting him. He’s just staring, standing there in the room, staring at Illya, a red flush across his cheek in the shape of Illya’s hand.

‘Illya?’ he asks.

It should be dark in the room now. It isn’t dark. The light is coming from an electric bulb, hanging from the ceiling on a twisted flex, ameliorated by a fabric shade.

It’s like being able to breathe again. There is warmth in the air. Everything is still.

  
  


‘I – still don’t understand what happened,’ Napoleon is saying.

They are sitting at a table in the bar, the heat from the fire pushing into their clothes. The tick of the clock goes on, and on, and on, with no repeats. Illya has his hands around a dark pint of stout. Napoleon’s drink is sitting on the table, hardly touched.

‘I don’t know if I understand entirely,’ Illya says.

He takes another mouthful of the stout. It’s rich and tasteful, and he has no fear as he drinks it. There’s no sense of danger, of drinking the poison of another time.

‘It’s – ’ He falters, because it all feels like a dream. It feels like describing the embarrassing contents of last night’s dream, that can’t possibly make sense in the light of day. ‘As far as I can glean, there were two forces,’ he says. ‘The woman and a man were one. I saw the woman. I never really saw the man. I just heard his voice sometimes, but it was strange, almost like an echo of my own voice. They were one force. The guardians of time. Something like that.’

‘And – ’ Napoleon prompts him, because Illya is faltering again, frowning, trying to bring it all together and have it make sense.

‘And –  _ Them _ ,’ he says. ‘The other force. Trying to bring chaos. They were trying to change the passage of time. It was – a battle between these two forces. Miss Rawlins was their unwitting victim, their means to an end. She desperately wanted to change that moment in her past. That was the weakness that let  _ Them _ in.’

‘The other two, the man and woman?’

‘They were trapped in the gaslight. It’s – I think it was like being trapped in a river. A river flows through the land but it’s not of the land. Does that make sense? The water comes from elsewhere and goes elsewhere? Well, the gas is like that. It comes from another time, and we let it flow through our homes and our workplaces, as if it’s completely harmless. But it’s not. It’s mixing the past and the present. It’s a terrible weakness. So, somehow  _ They _ trapped the other two in this gaslight. They’d managed to get so close to the room they needed to be in, but they were trapped in the perfect globe of the shade. The shape meant they couldn’t get out.’

Napoleon holds up a hand. ‘Two people – could be trapped in a light shade the size of a child’s ball?’

‘If you’re asking for this to make sense, Napoleon, apply to someone else, not me,’ Illya tells him dryly. ‘I’m just telling you the impression that I have. What I found there in my head when all this was over.’

‘Okay,’ Napoleon concedes. ‘All right. I’ll admit that sense is a few thousand miles away from any of this. So, they were trapped in the light?’

‘They were trapped in the light. The gas travelling into the light and being burnt was a point where that moment in time combusted against a time millions of years ago. A perfect fracture in the fabric of time, a crevice to trap someone in. They were trying to get us to come and help them. Somehow, for some reason, they managed to connect with me, out of all the people in this place. When we got close enough,  _ They _ – the bad side, I mean – got into you. They tried to make you be their agent, to go into the room and stop the liaison before it was discovered, before the scandal ever happened. I managed to overcome you and get you into that other room, and I smashed the light. The man and woman were set free, and – ’

‘And somehow they managed to do what they were always meant to do?’ Napoleon asks. ‘They stopped time being derailed.’

‘They must have done,’ Illya nods. ‘Because that was the moment when we found ourselves standing in a staff member’s empty bedroom in nineteen sixty eight. That was the moment when everything was resolved.’

‘And Miss Rawlins is just as she always was,’ Napoleon says rather soberly. ‘Disgraced. Alone.’

‘Yes,’ Illya replies.

He tries not to feel too sharp a regret. There’s still a fear there. It’s something deep in his bones. It was regret that provided the opening for all of this to begin. It was regret that created the weakness.

‘Who were they, though?’ Napoleon asks. ‘The man and the woman? What – were they?’

Illya shakes his head. ‘She had on a slate-blue dress. She seemed – I don’t know. Lovely. A rare breed. Him? I never saw him. I only heard his voice. He sounded – austere.’

‘I would have liked to have seen her,’ Napoleon says, and there’s a sparkle in his eyes.

‘You are incorrigible,’ Illya tells him.

Napoleon lifts his drink at last, and takes a long few mouthfuls. The fire crackles, and their clothes are beginning to dry out. There’s no one else in the bar. It’s late. The barman is standing behind his counter, gathering in the empty glasses that have been left there. They sit there, drinking, in a warm and reliable present reassured by the gentle movement of the clock.

At last the barman glances at his watch, clinks a couple of glasses together, and tells them, ‘Time, gentlemen. Thank you.’

Illya meets Napoleon’s eyes, for a long moment. Then they stand, and bring their glasses to the bar.


End file.
